Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation – “An Urgent and Essential Read” to Protect Childhood from Smartphones

Shortly after 2010, when smartphones became ubiquitous and part of young people’s lives, something went terribly wrong. Signs of teenage mental health distress spiked sharply in the United States, the U.K., and other western countries. In the U.S. alone:

Depression and anxiety among college students more than doubled between 2010 and 2018.
Between 2010 and 2020, emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% for teen girls and 48% for boys.
Suicide rates for younger adolescents shot up, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys.

What is behind the youth mental health crisis?

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, attributes this mental health crisis to what he calls “the Great Rewiring of Childhood,” a seismic shift in how young people are growing up amidst smartphones, social media, and addictive online gaming.

Psychology professor Dr. Jean Twenge was one of the first to sound the alarm in 2017 in a groundbreaking article “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Haidt and Twenge frequently collaborate on this topic.

In an insightful book review, Sophie McBain of The Guardian unpacks Jonathan Haidt’s new work The Anxious Generation, ominously subtitling her article “an urgent and persuasive warning about the toll of ‘phone-based’ childhoods.”

Some of Haidt’s key points and McBain’s analysis follow:

Childhood has shifted from being play-based to phone-based

Children are becoming increasingly disconnected from the real world, says McBain, “spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn.”

Children are overprotected in the real world and underprotected online

In an age of helicopter parenting, where children’s lives are more scheduled and supervised than ever, parents allow their children less opportunity to take age-appropriate risks in the real world – such as playing unsupervised, running errands alone, or roaming in small groups.

Simultaneously, parents have done too little to protect children from ever-present online dangers: cyberbullying, predatory advances, and harmful content glorifying disordered eating, suicide, and self-harm.

Given the dire state of the world today, are smartphones really to blame?

Critics of Haidt’s theory cite rising climate change (and subsequent climate anxiety), racial and economic inequality, information overload, and the 24/7 news cycle as significant stressors affecting youth. McBain offers Haidt’s counterargument: “Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability … and collective crises don’t typically produce individual psychological ones, perhaps because they often engender a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose.” World War II was indeed a global crisis that called individuals to collective action.

Mounting evidence that smartphones – and social media – are tanking mental health

Studies have directly linked time spent online with a rising risk of depression. The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that depression rates rose in proportion to hours spent on social media. The effect was most pronounced amongst girls. Girls spending over five hours a day on social media were three times as likely to become depressed as those who did not use the platforms.

What if social media did not cause the depression, but it is actually the other way around? Perhaps depressed people simply spend more time scrolling online.

When Facebook was initially rolled out at just a handful of universities, a study compared students who engaged with the platform and those who did not. Its findings? Facebook increased poor mental health on campus. Researchers found “a significant link between the presence of Facebook and increases in anxiety and depression among college students.” McBain adds that “five other studies have demonstrated a link between the arrival of high-speed internet and rising rates of mental illness.”

Why would being online affect teen mental health?

Of all age groups, teens are the group most frequently on their phones. A 2022 Pew Media report found that 46% of them are online “almost constantly.” But it is not the sheer hours of screentime that matter. The problem with spending hours on social media or being “extremely online,” engaging in multiple platforms and forums, is what that online existence is replacing.

McBain summarizes the loss beautifully: “Smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, ‘forever elsewhere.’”

Haidt calls smartphones “experience blockers,” which prevent us from engaging in real-world experiences and relationships. “Consider how many enriching activities were displaced when young people began spending hours a day online, chasing likes, following vapid influencers, substituting the richness of real-life friendship with shallow online communication,” McBain summarizes. That loss is magnified in the case of teens, who are in midst of a period of rapid social and emotional development.

Teen brains are particularly vulnerable to peer criticism. Cyberbullying can be acute, cruelty magnified by a perception of social distance.

“What middle-aged adult doesn’t feel relief to have grown up before smartphones?” McBain notes. “Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are.”

So what does Haidt recommend?

To reclaim childhoods from the internet, Haidt recommends some sweeping social changes:

No phones in schools.
Governments should hold social media companies to account, legally requiring them to care for the well-being of young people.
Internet adulthood should begin at age 16 (not 13, the threshold for entry on many platforms).
Social media giants must institute proper age verification.

In conclusion

Haidt persuasively makes a case for a return to real connections in the real world, instead of inane online substitutes. “There’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart,” he writes, paraphrasing the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”

McBain’s verdict? “The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media.”

McBain’s review is well worth a read. Find the full article here.

Or read Jonathan Haidt’s new article in The Atlantic: “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now: The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.”

McBain, Sophie. “The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – a pocket full of poison.” The Guardian, 21 Mar 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/21/the-anxious-generation-by-jonathan-haidt-a-pocket-full-of-poison.